There is something oddly comforting about reading my father's autopsy.

Maybe it's the good news: "The skin is normal. The esophagus is without lesions. The stomach is unremarkable. The small intestines contain mostly undigested food particles." Even quitting smoking 17 years before had paid dividends: "There's only mild emphysema."

Or perhaps it's the good that came out of it: "The patient had most organs donated, including kidneys, heart valves, liver, eyes, parts of spleen and lymphatic tissue, bladder, prostate, and most of pancreas."

My father's death, we know from the Center for Organ Recovery, ultimately improved the lives of a half-dozen men and women in the Northeast.

Or maybe, probably, it's that it brings me back to the exact moment in time when everything changed. His life, suspended instantly. Mine, altered forever. Yet I feel a sense of potential. Of what might have been had he been holding the railing, as Mom instructed twice. Of how things might have gone differently had we understood what was happening inside his brain that day, or even over the previous five years. Or, frankly, if anyone in the family had bothered to wonder what killed his aunt and two uncles, brought his grandmother to stare-into-space dementia, and put his own mother in a nursing home six years before, where she lay that fateful day unable to speak or move.